The aoe-mkshelf command is not needed on systems
that have udev installed and is incompatible with aoe drivers that have
the aoe_dyndevs module parameter set to 1.

Systems lacking udev and having
an aoe driver that uses static minor device numbers can use aoe-mkshelf
to create the block special files necessary to access the AoE devices with
the given shelf address.

All aoe drivers prior to aoe6-50 use static minor
device numbers. Versions 50 and up use dynamic minor device numbers when
the module parameter aoe_dyndevs=1 is set.

If you are using static minor
device numbers and your aoe driver supports only one partition per device
(whole-disk partitions), then the device files must match, and you should
use the n_partitions environment variable described below.

In
this example, the root user on a host named nai creates special files for
using the aoe disks in shelf 7. Then he remembers that the driver doesn’t
have partition support, so the command is called again with n_partitions
set to 1.